


'Till Human Voices Wake Us, And We Drown

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Unresolved Emotional Tension, supposed unrequited love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 17:54:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1867008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You're breathing and talking and your eyes keep meeting halfway across a gap so infinite it doesn't have a name but nothing between you is ever being said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	'Till Human Voices Wake Us, And We Drown

**Author's Note:**

> "And indeed there will be time  
> To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”  
> Time to turn back and descend the stair,  
> With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —  
> (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)  
> My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,  
> My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —  
> (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)  
> Do I dare  
> Disturb the universe?  
> In a minute there is time  
> For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." - T.S Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

Words are the weak hydrogen bonds that stitch people together, building, creating, something new between two. But words are your barriers, your blockades that force you into denial and miserable solitude and words that are never said are the most important ones to say out of them all.

When you look at him you see distance and an armour of knitwear and stony expressions, you see his glances away and disinterest and an overwhelming tiredness of you.

When he looks at you he sees cold calculation and predetermined viciousness and intellect, he sees cold steel and aloofness and disappointment in every living creature.

You - you both - are only protecting yourselves from what you believe to be the inevitable rebuttal, the refusal. And it would be funny, perhaps hilarious, even, except of course that you are the furthest imaginable from a man-cum-machine and he is the least idiotic person you know.

So when at last you part and you say "goodbye, goodbye", like the most you are - you'll ever be - are good acquaintances with slowly drying conversation and facial communication becoming stilted and forced. The things unsaid are tearing your cells apart, fibre by fibre. But you both think-

"It's for the best."

Because you think it will get easier, you think the separation of yourselves from this supposed unrequited feeing will make the pain diminish. And it will do, to an extent. To an extent.

When you were eleven you ran away with four sandwiches and twelve pounds and your thoughts. You planned to catch a train - to anywhere, anywhere at all, you just want to be not there - but stopped and sat in a ditch next to a sparrow who didn't sing, didn't talk, just watched you. You thought of trivial things like the most number of legs ever recorded on a millipede or the shape of your nose just caught out of the corners of your eyes or your father's secretive affair or the fibres knitted together to make carpets or how old you would be when you died. None of these things could be said out loud. There were certain taboos you didn't understand but adhered to nonetheless.

See, you both could have had it so much better but words dance a fatal waltz with denial and the sentences you think you're going to say get caught like smoke on your tongues. Before long you're choking on them, inhaling something deadly and not quite tangible and as you swallow and swallow the debris gets caught in your lungs and you can't breathe around the syllables any more so you let them drift as inconspicuously as clouds into the air around your face. Gone, they're gone.

The day - you were nearly twelve and it was October - drew to a close and you watched the winter light fade. The sparrow left. You found yourself wrenchingly alone so you picked up the uneaten attempted provisions and walked back to the house. No one questioned where you had been, but that didn't matter. You didn't say a thing. The dusk was eaten by the dark.

So now you're lying on your single bed alone in a shadowed room that once belonged to a flat belonging to you both, except the room has become so insignificant it is steadily eclipsed by the cosmic vastness of your thoughts, travelling below your eyelids in eddies and swirls that you can't quite grasp with both hands but you can feel on your skin.

Right now, seven miles from where you are, he's sitting at a desk chair that perhaps once saw productivity and all his thoughts of celestial importance have been silenced, muffled by the walls which have never seen you. He is sitting in the absolute

darkness

of what he persuaded his mind to become because thinking so hard or so vaguely has never been so painful.

Both of you consider what you were. Consider what you could have been. What you were never changed into.

You hold your fingertips just before your mouth, as if they can drink words of silence that you can say now, to the dust. You look so lost, buried in complications seen only to you and your mind sounds like a roar of lions or the sea and a clash of teeth. I know; I can hear it.

But you're just a boy. A lost and estranged little boy who is too afraid to say constructions of words which will inevitably elicit change. You've done your thinking. Come home and this time, be brave enough to open your mouth.


End file.
